A state that serves and protects the powerful

The self-sacrificing and inspiring struggle by relatives of the Merseyside fans who needlessly died at Hillsborough in 1989 to establish the truth, must add to the erosion of public confidence in state institutions of rule and power.

It was an independent panel, not the state, that finally exposed the large-scale conspiracy to cover up police and emergency service failures at the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.

Panel members fought for the disclosure of the documents that revealed that police altered witness statements and ran a concerted campaign to denigrate and blame the fans for their own deaths.

But we’re not just talking about the police here. Other key sections of the state were involved in allowing the police smear story to stand for nearly a quarter of a century.

The judicial system and the coroners’ court also closed ranks to block the real story from coming out. And Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister, was briefed that "the defensive – and at times close to deceitful – behaviour by senior officers in South Yorkshire sounds depressingly familiar".

The executive arm of the state under the Tories did not want to upset a relationship with the police that had served them well.

The same South Yorkshire police force brutally attacked miners at Orgreave, not far from Hillsborough, during their great strike in 1984. Undoubtedly, the contempt of the police for the working class was a factor in their shocking treatment of the Liverpool fans five years later.

What is at stake here is the nature and role of the state, what and who it serves and what can be done to transform how we are ruled.

Lord MacDonald, former Director of Public Prosecutions and now a Liberal peer, knows more than most about the power of the state to rule through secrecy. He told Radio 4 Today’s programme that the “real lesson is the inability of our state”, after an “operational catastrophe is to be truthful about what happened”.

There is a “tendency”, he added, for “British public authorities to see themselves as apart from the public” added to which was a “very deep and long-standing corruption within our police services”.

But MacDonald’s view of a “a culture of deceit” within the police which is “quite breathtaking” still doesn’t get to the nub of things. The police reflect the nature of the whole state, not just its repressive arm.

State secrecy and deceit is the norm, whether it’s the cosy relationship with corporate and financial power, the lies over the invasion of Iraq, or the hidden agenda over issues like nuclear power or the break-up of the NHS. Vital documents are simply kept under lock and key.

The “public authorities” don’t just see themselves as something separate. They are, in practice, just that. Just ask people with disabilities facing gruelling and distressing “assessment” by the Atos corporation.

Our present state system is alienated from society precisely because it exists not to serve people as a whole but to enforce the status quo. It is more accurate, therefore, to describe it as a capitalist state with institutions that ultimately reinforce each other in defence of privilege and power.

Former New Labour home secretary Jack Straw has blamed “police impunity” on Thatcher. That’s only part of the story. This impunity is to be found in the very nature of a force that is effectively the strong arm of the state. Think about Jean Charles de Menezes or Ian Tomlinson. Or Mark Duggan.

The Hillsborough report will impact on millions of people, not just football fans. Confidence in the police and other sections of the state is already at an all-time low.

A state that cannot and will not protect its citizens, economically, socially or physically, does not deserve our endorsement. Hillsborough is the case for a deconstruction of the present state system and its reconstruction along truly democratic, transparent, accountable lines.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

  

Game over as the Met's mask slips

Just in case any student still thinks that the police’s role ought to be to facilitate protests and demonstrations, the commissioner of the Met, Sir Paul Stephenson, has put them right. As they showed in London on Wednesday, the police as a state force have other loyalties.

They kept a mainly teenage, mostly peaceful group of protesters against the rise in tuition fees hemmed in between police lines for over nine hours in the freezing cold. This was after a police van was conveniently left isolated and promptly vandalised.

Stephenson defended the notorious “kettling” operation, describing the area as a “crime scene”. What rubbish! The police on the ground were under orders from Scotland Yard and no doubt the Home Office. The clear objective was to demoralise the school and university students by denying them the right to move through the streets.

Michael Chessum, a co-founder of the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, was right when he commented: "It is the kind of policing we saw on Wednesday that creates disorder. If you refuse to allow people, many of them young, first-time protesters, the right to walk down the streets of their own capital city, and then 'kettle' them in Whitehall for eight or nine hours, people are going to get frustrated."

As Jenny Jones, a Green Party representative on the Metropolitan Police Authority which questioned Stephenson, pointed out, the effect had been to “imprison thousands of people”, adding: "You kept people for nine-and-a-half hours. You punished innocent people for going on a protest. How can that be right? I just do not see it."

Stephenson does not have to account for tactics to the MPA and he told – or rather warned – the authority that the “game has changed and we must act”. In recent years the Met had reduced the numbers of officers deployed to tackle demonstrations, he said. "Regrettably, we are going to have to review that. We are going to have to take a more cautious approach."

The Met chief’s statement is a clear indication that the police are preparing to suppress mass civil disorder which is an expression of the anger that the spending cuts and the consequent rise in tuition fees – have already provoked and which is bound to intensify.

In practice, is not that the “game” has changed but that the mask has slipped. How the police like to portray themselves and the reality of their actual role in the power structures of the state is usually obscured by anodyne statements like “serving the community” and “protecting the public”.

But when push comes to shove, when resistance to government’s policies strays beyond marching from point A to point B or signing petitions and actually expresses social frustration and anger, the role of the police is solely to protect the state. Before most of today’s student marchers were born, the police showed their loyalty by brutally attacking pickets and communities during the 1984-5 miners’ strike for jobs.

So this not some “neutral” state that is just a little too skewed towards big business and property, which can be redirected to serve a more progressive purpose. The modern state evolved alongside and in response to the needs of capitalism and is geared in every way to sustaining and developing the profit system. So when, for example, the financial markets insist on spending cuts, the state – and its political expression in the form of the government – jumps to attention.

A strategy for resisting the cuts and the rise in tuition fees must, therefore, incorporate the vision of creating new democratic social and political structures, building on the ideas like People’s Assemblies. Then the game of capitalist rule will really be over.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

A law unto themselves

Once again the police have blood on their hands and a cover-up is already well under way. That’s the only conclusion you can draw from the video of the gratuitous police attack on bystander Ian Tomlinson during last week’s G20 protests in the City of London, soon after which he collapsed and died. 

The police had the area covered from every angle by CCTV and by their own photographers and must have known what happened. Yet the first official statement said that Tomlinson just happened to be found in a side street and that the Met’s brave police were attacked when they went to his assistance! 

Sounds familiar? Jean Charles de Menezes, you will recall, was alleged to have leapt over a Tube ticket barrier and was wearing a bulky jacket, clearly trying to evade the police. None of this, naturally enough, turned out to be true. Yet no one was prosecuted for the execution of the Brazilian electrician while he sat reading his newspaper. And you can bet that the same will apply in the case of Tomlinson. 

Why? Because the police are always only “doing their duty” in “difficult circumstances”. And what is this higher “duty” that allows them to behave with impunity and do things that ordinary citizens would end up in jail for? The duty in question conferred on the police by the state is to protect the status quo of capitalist society by whatever means are necessary, lawful and otherwise. 

The first professional police force in the world was set up first in London in the 1830s and then throughout the rest of the country at a time of major social and political unrest. Workers had demanded and been refused the vote, trade unionists were deported from Dorset for illegally combining and riots were breaking out against the introduction of the workhouse for the unemployed. 

The Royal Commission on the Police 1839 reported that the creation of a force  throughout the country was a way in which “the constitutional authority of the supreme executive is thus emphatically asserted”. What the commission was talking about was the authority of the state as a whole in relation to maintaining and developing capitalism in terms of  private property, as our book Unmasking the State – a rough guide to real democracy elaborates in more detail.  

And that’s how the boys in blue have behaved ever since, with the notable exception of the London police strike after World War One when demands for an independent union were ruthlessly crushed. The high command of the state in the shape of senior officers sets the tone with wild statements about a “summer of rage” on the streets and then the unthinking plods are sent into action to do their worst, which they gleefully do. That’s what happened at the Climate Camp in Kent last year and is routine for just about any protest or action that is not some orderly march from point A to point B. 

As the economic slump develops, more and more people will act to defend their jobs and their livelihoods. The police are being prepared for this by the sinister and secret Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO). This is the organisation that did the Thatcher’s government’s bidding during the miners’ strike, which began 25 years ago. In the course of that dispute, a total of 11,000 miners were arrested, 7,000 injured, eleven people died, and 1,000 men were sacked. More than 100 were jailed.

The present capitalist state is clearly an alienating power that is undemocratic and more or less the plaything of the corporations and banks. The police, together with the army and the spy agencies, are this state’s enforcers and nothing will change their historic role. This should add to the urgency of developing a strategy for creating a new kind of  political democracy. This would be founded on co-ownership and control of resources and require the replacement of institutions like the police with new forms of community control.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor 

Salute the miners’ strike for jobs

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the start of the great miners’ strike in defence of jobs and communities. Their year-long confrontation with the state and the Tory government remains an outstanding example of the determination of ordinary working people to fight for their rights.

By the time of the strike, officially, unemployment in Britain had risen to around 3.25 million – although the real total was nearer 4 million - and the privatisation of all the great state industries, starting with British Telecom, was underway. It was the miners alone who answered the call of history, and challenged the right of the state and governments to put people out of work and into poverty.

The strike was provoked by the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher when the state-controlled National Coal Board (NCB) on 1 March 1984 announced plans for the closure of 20 pits in Yorkshire with the loss of 20,000 jobs. The government was in fact secretly planning for the closure of 70 pits throughout the country and the virtual destruction of the industry.

The 600 miners at Cortonwood colliery in South Yorkshire met on Sunday 4 March and voted to strike, calling on the Yorkshire Area of the National Union of Miners for support, which was duly given a few days later. The miners of Scotland, Wales, the North-East, Kent and North Derbyshire came out on March 12.

So began one of the longest, most decisive, most determined and extraordinary strikes of all time. The government had prepared very carefully for this showdown, building up stocks of coal at the power stations, while at the same time switching some of them to burn oil.

They had appointed Ian MacGregor, the butcher of the steel industry, as the new chief at the NCB. State agents were planted in the unions, including the NUM, and the government cultivated good relations with the leaders of the right-wing unions. Social security laws were changed and the scope of the anti-union laws was extended. Plans for the national deployment of police were drawn up. In short the power of the state machine was considerably enhanced.

Within a few days, when it became evident that many of the Nottinghamshire miners might defy the strike, the forces of the state were unleashed. Thousands of police from all over the country were drafted into Nottinghamshire in order to seal the county off from the mass pickets of Yorkshire. Road-blocks were set up round the county, coaches were turned away, pickets had their cars smashed, and if they did get through (which they usually did in large numbers), they were met by thousands of police at the gates of the pits. Nearly 10,000 miners were arrested altogether during the strike, and over 8,000 of them were charged. Hundreds were jailed.

Injunctions and contempt of court actions were taken out by the NCB, and later Arthur Scargill, the miners’ leader, was served with a High Court writ while he was inside the Labour Party conference. On 5 October, he had a second writ served on him for simply declaring the strike official and a week later the union was fined £200,000. This led the following month to the seizure and sequestration of all the funds and assets of the union to the tune of around £10m.

Neil Kinnock and the other leaders of the Labour Party sat on their hands, while continuing to hide behind the call for a ballot. The trade union leaders, terrified of the implications of the strike and of breaking the law, hardly even turned up. They confined their activities to giving money and searching for a compromise solution, which was never to be had.

Inside the mining communities there emerged a new source of strength, the wives and the women. They joined the picket lines, set up soup kitchens to feed everyone in the community and organised a joyful Xmas 1984, insofar as money would allow. And all over the country hundreds of thousands of individual trade unionists and other supporters gave money and material support — and this flowed in from France, Australia, the Soviet Union and other countries.

The miners were eventually forced back to work. On 3 March 1985 they marched into the pits proudly behind their bands and their banners without a settlement. They were driven back not by their leaders – who stood firm – but as a direct result of a long process of back-sliding and abandonment of principles on the part of the Labour Party and the TUC in the face of the new offensive of the corporations internationally.

The Thatcher government had deployed the full might of the state to the task of defeating the miners because they represented the final, and the most formidable obstacle to its aim of making Britain fit for the corporations as one of the centres of the new globalised economy.

Today, the fight for jobs is once more top of the agenda as the global capitalist economy plunges into slump. As in 1985, most union leaders have abandoned any resistance to the state and the employers. The heroic miners’ strike remains an inspiration, however, and provides valuable lessons for today. Above all, the miners demonstrated that the power of the capitalist state stands between working people and the right to determine their own future in terms of jobs and communities.

P J Arkell
Photographer during the miners’ strike

Miners in challenge to ANC

Not a lot has changed for South Africa’s 500,000 miners since the end of apartheid. Most days, a miner is killed as he labours in unsafe conditions to extract precious metals for sale by the mining corporations. Today, members of the 270,000-strong Miners Union of South Africa stage a 24-hour strike against the rising death toll. Some 201 miners have been killed in accidents so far this year, compared with 199 for the whole of 2006.

The union expects some 40,000 members to march on the Chamber of Mines in Johannesburg, which includes famous names like AngloGold Ashanti, Gold Fields, Harmony Gold, Anglo Platinum, Impala Platinum and Lonmin. South African miners produce three-quarters of the world's platinum and more than a 10th of its gold in shafts that are up to 3.78 kilometres underground.

South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki ordered a safety audit of the country's mines after 3,200 workers were temporarily trapped at Harmony Gold Mining’s Elandsrand operation in October, but the death rate has continued to rise. Despite ever-rising prices for precious metals, especially gold and platinum, the owners have failed to invest in improved safety measures.

The owners know that there is a massive pool of unemployed workers ready to work in dangerous conditions, especially in mines where the union is not strong. Those who extract the fabulous wealth that lies underground, just like the poor workers in the townships, are treated with contempt, or are at best targets for token acts of charity while the mine owners and the country’s ruling political elite live off the fruits of their labour.

Miners are not the only South African workers battling for a decent standard of living 17 years after the ending of apartheid. In Cape Town, work is underway on a showpiece new stadium for the 2010 World Cup. It is a 68,000-seat arena within sight of the notorious Robben Island, where Nelson Mandel was imprisoned for years under the apartheid regime. The city’s newest icon has already been the subject of strikes and protests.

The government is spending R420bn [£30.1bn] on the 2010 World Cup and related infrastructure projects. Fifa is making a big show of providing affordable tickets for the poor. It has announced that the cheapest tickets for games will be sold only to South Africa residents for about $20, and a further 120,000 will be given away to the lowest paid. But even at $20, tickets are beyond the reach of ordinary workers who are building the stadium. So the World Cup is simply another profit-making bonanza for contractors and the media.

President Mbeki and his deputy Jacob Zuma are presently engaged in a struggle for the leadership of the ANC at its conference later this month. Zuma’s left demagogy has won him widespread backing, despite his pro-business policies and association with corruption. Today’s one-day strike is an indication that the working class needs to go beyond the ANC and its grip on power to carry through the social revolution against capitalist corporations.


Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary